A Tough Car From A Bygone Era

May 20, 2008|By Dan Neil Los Angeles Times

Let's get the unpleasantries out of the way: The Dodge Challenger is to our current economy-and-energy nexus what a bull fiddle would be to Nero's burning Rome. This reimagining of the Chrysler's E-body classic, the 1970 Dodge Challenger, is very close to the last thing the world needs right now.

Behold a $40,000 muscle car that gets single-digit fuel economy when your boot's in it - and, come on, your boot is always in it - aimed at upper-middle-class to wealthy males between ages 45 and death. Not exactly the car of tomorrow. Last week, when the first production cars began rolling off the line in Brampton, Ontario, the average price for a gallon of sweet petroleum liquor was $3.61 a gallon - oh, sorry, that was for regular unleaded, whereas the Challenger's 6.1-liter, 425-hp V8 would much prefer to burn premium. If that weren't enough, looming on the horizon are tough, new fuel-economy standards that will make snot-flinging V8s like the Challenger's "Hemi" the stuff of history books.

In other words, the Dodge Challenger is brilliant.

If ever a genre of automobiles needed a last hurrah, it's the pony car. In the next two years, the Challenger and the coming-soon Chevrolet Camaro will re-create the pony car wars of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and then go away for precisely the same reasons they did in the early 1970s: increasing fuel economy standards and the price of gas. I'm fascinated by the symmetry of it. Watching Camaro and Challenger go at it will be like watching the misty, misguided nostalgia of Civil War reenactments, except here both sides lose.

Before Chrysler can get to the business of building greener cars - and on this score it's the most backward of all the auto companies - it has to stay in business. To that end, the Challenger offers a huge rate of return in publicity and street cred. The car is essentially a rebodied Chrysler 300 (the same as the Dodge Charger, minus 4 inches of wheelbase), built on the same assembly line. According to the Detroit News, Chrysler spent a mere $151 million on the program, going from concept car to Job One in fewer than 21 months. Chrysler could never make a dime off the Challenger program and happily write it off as a marketing expense. And that's almost certainly what will happen.

The relative handful of geezers who buy this car - the 2008 model year run of 6,800 units already has been sold - will not be fretting fuel economy, the price of gas or the perspiration of polar bears. The car is aimed like a Hellfire missile at the emotional groins of boomers who have loads of cash and empty nests. The car will sell like mad for a year or two and then fall off a cliff. That will make it relatively rare, enough to give it the cachet of a collector's item.

There's plenty of room for disagreement here, but if I had to identify the most iconic Mopar monster from the era, it wouldn't be the Plymouth Superbird or B-body Charger R/Ts, it would be the Challenger, simply on the strength of the 1971 movie "Vanishing Point." This comically overdrawn and faux-existential chase movie stars a white Challenger R/T hardtop (the last car ever to look cool in white) and Barry Newman, who plays Kowalski, a car-delivery driver gone Crazy Ivan. Utterly gravid with counter-culture cliches - bad cops, Jesus freaks, soul brothers, free-love sisters - "Vanishing Point" is nonetheless an essential car-guy movie, a Mopar-powered romp across the American West. I would go so far as to say that without the movie, the new Challenger would never have come to be.

And the new Challenger is a really nice car. I know - I was surprised too. The retro-futuristic interpretation of the classic Challenger is truly ingenious, pulling all the lines and details - the blacked-out grille, the race-style fuel filler cap, hood scoops, the kicked-up character line, the overall proportions - into a visual algorithm that suggests the original car while actually being nothing like it. The new car is huge, with 6 inches more wheelbase (116 inches) than the old Challenger. The old car, with its sculpted turn-under and sides, seems almost delicate compared to the big, bluff neo-Challenger. Plainly, the designers had to work around the many hard points of the 300's boxy body structure. Still, they managed to hide the bulk convincingly.